Bitcoin mining pool BTC.com reports $3M cyberattack

Major cryptocurrency mining pool BTC.com has suffered a cyberattack resulting in a significant loss of funds by the company and its customers.

BTC.com experienced a cyberattack on Dec. 3, with attackers stealing around $700,000 in client assets and $2.3 million in the company’s assets, the mining pool’s parent firm BIT Mining Limited officially announced on Dec. 26.

BIT Mining and BTC.com reported the cyberattack to law enforcement authorities in Shenzhen, China. The local authorities subsequently launched an investigation into the incident, starting collecting evidence and requesting assistance from relevant agencies in China. The local coordination has already helped BTC.com recover some of the assets internally, the announcement notes.

“The company will devote considerable efforts to recover the stolen digital assets,” BIT Mining said, adding that it has also deployed technology to “better block and intercept hackers.”

Despite facing the incident, BTC.com continues running its mining pool services to customers, the firm stated:

“BTC.com is currently operating its business as usual, and apart from its digital asset services, its client fund services are unaffected.”

One of the world’s largest cryptocurrency mining pools, BTC.com provides multi-currency mining services for various digital assets including Bitcoin (BTC) and Litecoin (LTC). Apart from mining services, BTC.com also operates a blockchain browser. Its parent company, BIT Mining, is a publicly traded firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Related: Bitcoin hashrate recovers after big freeze shuts down miners

BTC.com mining pool is the seventh biggest mining pool worldwide, accounting for 2.5% in total mining pool distribution over the past seven days, with a hashrate of 5.80 exahashes per second (EH/s), according to BTC.com data. BTC.com’s all-time Bitcoin hashrate contribution accounts for more than 5% of the total BTC mining pools’ hashrate.

BTC.com’s cyberattack investigation in China brings yet another crypto-related legal case for local authorities, which opted to put a blanket ban on all crypto operations last year. Despite the ban, China reemerged as the second-largest Bitcoin hashrate provider in January 2022 after briefly losing its global hashrate leadership in 2021.